Leland teen gets transplanted kidney from mom.
A Leland mother has given life to her daughter for a second time at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn.

Heidi Pentiuk and 17-year-old Stefani Pentiuk are recovering at the Ronald McDonald House in Rochester one week after the high school junior received her mother’s right kidney in a scheduled transplant.

“It’s just starting to sink in,” Heidi said of the experience as an organ donor. “Any mother would do this for her child. You don’t even think about it.”

The transplant is the second for the Leland junior. Eight years ago, a virus that attacked her heart caused severe damage and necessitated a transplant. After receiving the “gift of life” from a young boy, Stefani returned to life as a school girl in Leland. While her new heart worked fine, the strong medications taken to keep her body from rejecting the foreign organ affected her kidneys negatively.

“She started to have issues with her kidney a while ago,” said Heidi, whose teenager's creatinine blood levels were checked frequently in laboratory tests. Creatinine is one of the chemicals tested for to check kidney function. “As her function became lower and lower, we began talking transplant. I guess that was a year ago.”

By early April, the teenager’s kidney function was down to 11 percent. She began treatment at the “infusion” clinic at Munson Medical Center where she was bolstered by infusions of iron and Procrit, a medication that helps produce red blood cells.

“They wanted to keep her as healthy as possible going into the transplant,” Heidi said.

Not wanting to start dialysis because it weakens an already weakened body, doctors at the Mayo Clinic (where the heart transplant was completed) scheduled the kidney surgery. The Pentiuks, including Heidi and Stefani as well as dad Perry and Stefani’s older sister, Anna, set out for the clinic April 27 — the day after Stefani attended the all-county prom at the Leelanau Sands Showroom. Work identifying a donor began well before the operation was actually needed.

“We were encouraged to find a live donor rather than wait for a cadaver,” Heidi said.

Stefani’s immediate and extended family members submitted blood to identify possible donors. But zeroing in on a possible match became complicated as a result of the first transplant.

“She was kind of allergic to all of our (organs) because after the first transplant, the antibodies she makes are different than ours,” Heidi said.

Fortunately, advances in medical science allow kidney recipients to accept organs that aren’t 100 percent matches. A number of factors went in to the decision that the new kidney would come from Stefani’s mother.

“Anna is a college student and hasn’t had a family yet,” Heidi said. “She may need another down the road. I figured I should be the first donor.”

On April 30, surgeons removed Heidi’s right kidney at the Methodist Hospital, which is at one end of the Mayo Clinic, put it on ice in the cooler and sent it on down St. Mary’s (pediatric hospital) at the other end of the medical complex, where it was placed in Stefani. Heidi’s surgery took about two hours; Stefani’s four hours.

“Each doctor that came into my room would say, ‘Wow, you got a really good kidney,’” the teenager relayed in a message to friends and family in Leland on her website carepage through Mayo Clinic. “All of the message and comments from (people at home) made my mom and my recovery that much easier … I definitely believe that the prayers and support are what got us through this so quickly. Even the doctors are amazed at how fast we healed.”

As expected, recovery for Stefani has been faster than that of her mother. Stefani walked the courtyard at Mayo 15 times Tuesday, feeling good enough to “do anything.” Heidi said the first few days after the surgery were “painful”.

“If you need to find us, just look for two old ladies wearing sweatpants, walking about a mile an hour down the road,” Stefani joked in the email message. “We make each other laugh because we are so slow that we fell like grandmas.”

Messages will continue to be the major connection between the Pentiuk girls, Perry and Anna, who have already returned home to Leland as well as other family and friends for the next three weeks while they continue to recuperate in Minnesota. After returning home, Stefani’s medical status will be monitored through laboratory tests and the women will return to Rochester for a checkup about the time school begins next fall when Stefani will be a senior at Leland and her older sister, Anna, a senior nursing student at Hope College.

“It’s quite a miracle,” Heidi said.